rofl, Fedora for EU what a joke...
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Fedora is too much into RedHat, and that's an American company, it depends on it. You'll have to go at least Arch, or Debian (which are more community-driven), or Ubuntu or Mint (that are European). But I wouldn't use anything Redhat-produced for an EU OS.
SUSE/OpenSUSE seems like a much more European option
Τοο bad I don't like it as a distro... I find it ugly, e.g. the ancient yast gui it has. I'd prefer Debian myself, or a fork of it (if politically necessary).
So you find Gnome & KDE ugly? I've never needed to use Yast for any system configuration. Having BTFRS with snapshots as default makes it a great distro.
Yast is a must to configure it without headaches. It's an eyesore. I also don't like rpm in general. I tried OpenSuse last year, and I didn't like the experience of it. Then again, I don't like Fedora either. And I find Arch unstable. For me, Debian is where it's at.
Someone who doesn’t use the distro is saying a tool ‘is a must’ when I do use the distro and have never needed it. You do you, but the point of my original comment was that it’s a valid distro for Europeans wanting a non-US option. Doesn’t mean you need to like it or use, but others might.
But Fedora is based on an IBM product... so that's a swing and a miss. SuSE would be a better direction, IMO
Only after IBM purchased Redhat recently
Which was my point, yes.
Why Fedora? Sorry, but there are so many European options, it makes no sense to build a European house on an American basement.
Probably since it's the main redhat upstream and they want the advantage of already widespread usage.
Although at that point why not OpenSUSE for the same reason you mentioned.
Security is a big focus for gov usage, why not base off of Debian?
Rolling release/bleeding edge means security updates roll out fast.
Regular release distros do security updates, backported if needed. Rolling release means introducing unknown security bugs until they are found and fixed. To me, the whole dilemma between regular and rolling is do I want old bugs or new bugs? But the security bugs get fixed on both.
Suse is the first thing that came to mind
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The idea of a "distro for EU public sector" is neat, but even the PoC has some flaws when considering technical sovereignty.
First of all, using Gitlab & Gitlab CI. Gitlab is an American company with most of its developers based in the US. Sure, you could host it by yourself but why would you do it considering Forgejo is lighter and mostly developed by developers based in the EU area?
The idea of basing it on Fedora is also somewhat confusing. Sure, it's a good distro for derivatives, but it's mostly developed by IBM developers. The tech sovereignty argument doesn't hold well against Murphy's law.
For me, it's a perfectly fitting compromise, because Fedora is a community that is detached from RedHat and IBM, but it is also the best distribution out there.
They are pushing the envelope and have been for some time. If it weren't for Fedora devs we wouldn't have seen Wayland, PipeWire, Nouveau, etc be pushed to the general public. Also Fedora a libre distribution built by community. If that were ever to change they'd hemorrhage devs.
Compare that with Ubuntu. They want a vendor lock-in via Snaps (and in one point in time Mir), they're currently replacing coreutils (copyleft) with uutils (copyright) and have what I would say is a pretty bad and convoluted GPU stack.
OpenSuSE could probably be a better alternative, if they took the Linux desktop seriously. But they play second fiddle to Fedora and have not even been close enough to push the envelope like Fedora has.
In conclusion Fedora is the best libre Linux distributions out there.
Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn't fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.
Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn’t fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.
My exact thoughts lol
In conclusion Fedora is the best libre Linux distributions out there.
Aha.
Fedora is not that detached from IBM.They dictate it's development hence the removal of codecs. If it was a community addition why would it matter? And why would they remove the codecs. After that it was obvious fedora was not a community dustro but driven by Redhat.
If it was a community addition why would it matter? And why would they remove the codecs.
You don't have to be a corporation to be held liable for legal issues with hosting codecs. Just need to be big enough for lawyers to see you as an attractive target and in a country where codec patent issues apply. There's a very good reason why the servers for deb-multimedia (Debian's multimedia repo), RPM Fusion (Fedora's multimedia repo), VLC's site, and others are all hosted in France and do not offer US-based mirrors. France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable, unlike the US and even most other EU nations.
Fedora's main repos are hosted in the US. Even if they weren't, the ability for any normal user around the world to host and use mirrors is a very important part of an open community-friendly distro, and the existence of patented codecs in that repo would open any mirrors up to liability. Debian has the same exact issue, and both distros settled on the same solution: point users to a separate repo that is hosted in France which contains extra packages for patent-encumbered codecs.
France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable
TIL there is a country that sees reason about software patents
In my opinion, If sovereignty is the goal i think GTK based DE will be safer than QT based DE.
I am aware of The Free QT foundation And its relation to KDE but in a long term there is possibility of things might get complicated if there is change in policy . And even the QT trademark is not totally free. I'm not trying to start DE war, i love both KDE and GNOME.
The Qt foundation tried to get fucky once already, and KDE and some other major companies that rely on it were about ready to fork it if they persisted. Qt seemed to calm down after that.
Not a great relationship to be in though, constantly suspecting that your toolkit might do a rugpull at some point if the shareholders demand it. But I think they could pull off a fork if they ever did.
"Made with ❤️ in Brussels by Robert Riemann"
Clicked his URL…
"physicist and computer scientist…passionate about open source and free software, cryptography…"
Whew, almost read crypto"currency"…
"…and peer-to-peer technology such as BitTorrent or Blockchain/Bitcoin.
Goddammit.
--
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
To be fair, he said he's passionate about peer-to-peer technology and listed Bitcoin as an example. I don't think that makes him a crypto bro. He probably just appreciates the theory behind it.
hopefully a case of "if i don't include this keyword i will miss out on tons of shit from stupid people who want into the trend"
If the EU were concerned about the US jurisdiction of Linux projects it could pick:
- OpenSuSE (org based in Germany)
- Mint (org based in Ireland)
- Manjaro (org based in France/Germany, and based of Arch)
- Ubuntu (org based in UK)
However if they didn't care, then they could just use Fedora or other US based distros.
I think it would be a good idea for the EU to adopt linux officially, and maybe even have it's own distro, but I'm not sure this Fedora base makes sense. Ironically this may also be breaching EU trademarks as it's masquerading as an official project by calling itself EU OS.
I'd add:
- Mageia (French)
- Zorin OS (Ireland)
- Ufficio Zero (Italy)
Last option but better for an easy migration: linuxfx.org
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Why Fedora? They're basically Red Hat in a trench coat. I'd go with a EU based distro like Suse.
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I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word "Sovereign" 🤔
Personally I wouldn't want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.
I read the sovereign to mean something like an unified platform for EU institutions, that you can dev and train people on.
dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM
A very good point.
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I read EUDORA for a split second and got all excited that the best email client ever was getting reborn!
But this is cool too… i guess.
As much as I love what they're doing, tieing an OS to a specific region via name seems like the opposite of Open Source values.. Then again, I suppose it could just be forked into a more generalized version
This is specifically for the public sector. The fact that it is open source make it adaptable to different scenarios.
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Love this! We definitely should try to spread Linux to become more accessible and popular.